The Chadwick Family Papers

Saturday, April 28, 2012

The Nelson Man o'Bar

Winkleman Gallery

Summer 2011

The Nelson

Man o’Bar

The delirium of maritime things slowly takes
hold of me

The wharf and its atmosphere physically
penetrate me

—Álvaro de Campos

“Mumbai,
Torrent, Mumbai,” I reminded a slumped form sinking further into a divan’s
cushions. “It hasn’t been called Bombay
for 16 years.” “The Indians may call it
what they please, Mr. Shaw, so long as they don’t begin speaking of Mumbai
Sapphire martinis or rename the city once again during your flight. There must be no missed connections: I want
you and Mr. Blachly personally to accompany the Man o’Bar back to New
York. Or do you insist on calling it New
Amsterdam?” A flight to India;
negotiations with museum officials who would certainly curse the Chadwicks’
role in their country’s history; packing of a ten-and-a-half-foot model; and
then, if we were lucky, a two-month sea voyage on a container vessel around the
Cape of Good Hope! This was several
orders of magnitude more arduous than any errand we’d yet run for the
family. And yet I heard Blachly agreeing
without a pause. My neck spun nearly one
hundred and eighty degrees to glare at him: it was all fine if, on his own
time, he devoured Patrick O’Brian novels, lingered for unseemly periods in
regional maritime museums, and scrawled misinformed nautical terminology into
his notebook, calling it “sea poetry.”
Committing me to this kind of undertaking was entirely different.

Back at the studio I hit Blachly with a gale-force berating. There was, to begin with, the abject
financial nature of the Chadwicks’ proposition: under-budgeted travel expenses
alone (perhaps half of what we’d actually have to spend), with no compensation
for our time. Then there was the time
itself: what on earth led Blachly to believe that I had two free months to give
to an object I had never even seen, and about whose place in the family collections
I had, frankly, serious doubts? Finally
there were the manifold difficulties of the trip—negotiations, hardships,
inevitable contingencies. Under normal
circumstances—with a supportive client—I might even be okay with these. But things were different with the
Chadwicks. Both of us knew that if we didn’t
achieve precisely what they expected, the Chadwicks would hold us personally
responsible—and perhaps dock our expenses.
How would it feel to call them from Mumbai explaining that the Man o’Bar
had actually been de-accessioned from the museum, broken into tiny shards to
feed a funeral pyre, or that the curators wanted twenty three times more money than
we’d established? How much support would
we get then?

I was warming to the topic.
And yet, it was as if the promise of the exotic nautical trip had
rendered Blachly oblivious, thickening his oily skin into an impermeable
membrane. There was something cretinous,
to be sure, in the smile I couldn’t erase from his visage, but—I realized as I
lobbed my string of objections and, later, insults—something contagious as
well. And so in time I succumbed to the
germ of a nautical voyage. Why not? I was on a year off from teaching. Perhaps I needed to stray beyond my comfort
zone?

Mumbai had been frictionless.
The curators were eager, in fact, to unload what they thought of as a
lower-end relic of the colonial period.
And so the trip had all seemed smooth enough—even glamorous—until one
night in the middle of the Arabian Sea when the mosquito-like buzz of
motorboats signaled the approach of the Somali pirates.

I could make them out maybe three hundred yards away, and closing
quickly. Our crew on the Yaadon hadn’t
seemed like the type for a gun battle.
Which meant that, in the likely event of a ransom scenario, we’d be at
the mercy of the Indian government, or, worse, the Chadwicks—who had neither
the money nor the patience to be of much use.
Blachly was snoring loudly. I
gathered the essentials: water, beef jerky, rope, knife, flare—and rousted him. Though ashen and somewhat wide-eyed, he
seemed surprisingly accepting of this turn of fate. Had he been abducted by pirates before? There was no time to inquire.

We had arranged for the Man o’Bar’s shipping
crate to remain accessible during the voyage, placed at ground level at the
bow, so that, during the long days at sea, we could open the front end of the
container, pull the boat out on the weather deck, and begin the restoration
process. This had cost some money in
port, but was easily enough achieved.
Now we made our way up the starboard side of the wall of stacked
containers, invisible to the pirates, approaching from port, and wedged
ourselves inside ours. The struggle
didn’t last long. A few rocket propelled
grenades, some rounds from a Russian-made machine gun—and the pirates were in
charge. Several times they rounded the
bow—sizing up the loot, securing the boat’s perimeter. But there didn’t seem to be a concerted
search for us. Had the others lied about
our existence? Had they imagined that we
might rescue them? Two pirates sat guard
on the bow—conversation filtering into our metal cell thirty yards away, where,
baking, we tried our best to remain silent.
But on the second night they made their way back to the navigation
bridge—happy enough with its view, higher and covering most of the ship. Except those containers, like ours, that
opened onto the weather deck. And so,
about three o’clock in the morning, we quietly opened the doors, hauled the Man
o’Bar out, and plunged over the Yaadon’s railings.

The hull rushed by us. Now
we were to keep our heads under our vessel, which we hoped would either escape
notice or appear merely as a piece of random flotsam. We heard no raised
voices, no shots, saw no flares. From
the corner of the Man o’Bar we could now see the cargo ship’s stern, receding
into the distance. Apparently we were
free—though also floating alone in the middle of the Arabian Sea.

Which brings us to our precarious life raft, the Man o’Bar, whose
proper introduction has thus far been rendered impossible by the rush of
events. Clinging to it day and night in
the open ocean, however, brought us more than enough time to appreciate this
singular curio. Especially since I had
stopped speaking to Blachly, except to issue brief commands. My thoughts in his direction, upon our plunge
into the water, had been reduced to a single question: could I bring myself to
eat him? I saw no ethical objections—the
problem was entirely aesthetic, or, gastronomic. But so far the beef jerky was holding out,
and thus we floated in relative peace.

Life raft—that was a new resume line for the Man o’Bar, which
already had a surprisingly long one: sea cinema, study center, casket-like
proscenium theater, theme pub—the Nelson Man o’Bar has been tugged from the
beginning between the scholarly and the spectacular, the precise and the
preposterous. The mysterious object was
constructed initially as a scale model for Lord Nelson’s customized HMS Victory,
the boat the admiral commanded in his decisive sea campaign against Napoleon,
and on which he was killed by a French sharpshooter during the Battle of
Trafalgar in 1805. As the English
nation mourned the loss of this newly deified sea savior, and churned out all
manner of memorials to his life and labors, the Chadwicks quietly purchased the
model itself. It is described in the
family papers as a “machine for private grief.”
Most writers have glossed this ambiguous phrase as a shrine. But our dive into this region of the archive,
before the fateful Mumbai jaunt, suggested rather different uses: apparently
the Chadwicks found the passive contemplation of the boat as funeral monument
too remote and discovered that, by removing sections of the exterior planking,
it was possible, through some exertion, to wedge a human body fully inside the
hull. Chadwick Dalton was the first to
attempt this nautical model spelunking.
Inside, Dalton would re-enact the known portions of Nelson’s famous
death speech—which had in life lasted three hours, much of the duration of the
Battle of Trafalgar. Perhaps impatient
with these monologues, and certainly less interested in scholarly
reconstructions (or, as he called them, “historical reinaccuracies”), Torrent
Chadwick then began, on Dalton’s absences from the manor, to use the model as a
kind of nautical pub—and it was he who introduced the term Man o’Bar. At once prop for historical mourning, and
nautically-themed bar, the model navigated this cross-current of conflicting
uses at Chadwick Manor until sometime in the 1940s.

Then, as the family’s debts mounted, the Man
o’Bar was sold, first to the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which, unannounced to
the family, sent it off (possibly for authentication) to a maritime specialist
at the Victoria and Albert Museum—in Bombay.
There it was displayed for some years until that institution, too,
decided to dock the vessel in mothballs.

By the third day I could barely see. The glare had worked its way back inside my
head. At points Blachly appeared to me
as a slightly undercooked porpoise on a spit—though this may have been an
optical illusion caused by him clinging to one of the masts that had, by now,
fractured off the boat. As yet he wasn’t
even a vaguely tempting meal. Our first hours
in the water had been the most difficult.
When we tried to install the sails we discovered that they’d been
largely devoured by insects. It had been
Blachly who’d recommended keeping them furled until we reached the studio. Though I still held him responsible for our
predicament, the very hardship seemed, after three days, to bring us together
somewhat. At regular intervals he doggy
paddled a few strokes to retrieve rigging fragments or parts of the model that
were by now regularly breaking off.
These he then wedged as best he could into openings in the Man
o’Bar. Since neither of us had much
strength left, I interpreted this shepherding of the model as a gesture of
reconciliation. More, the boat listed
strongly to port in the open water. And
it was only with one of us kicking from behind and holding the Man o’Bar
straight that the other could find respite on the deck. But since my ankle was still swollen from a
break six months earlier, I pleaded for a smaller share of the paddling. Blachly accepted. And so it was that I was “on deck” when,
mid-afternoon on the fourth day, a vessel came into view. I waited a few seconds to make sure the
appearance wasn’t another optical trick—got Blachly’s confirmation—and then fired
the flare.

It was an Italian freezer trawler that, tempted by the richer
waters of the Arabian Sea, had made its way through the Suez Canal to fish from
the Gulf of Aden up to the Gulf of Oman.
Luckily it was now on its return voyage.
Amused to no end, the fishermen hoisted the Man o’Bar onto the deck and
got down to studying it—and us. We were
apparently the most exciting catch they’d made on the entire trip. Eruptions of laughter and idiomatic phrases
in a Neapolitan accent I couldn’t understand punctuated their examination. I tried to explain the circumstances of our
winding up floating on the boat. But
nothing I could say in my poor Italian could disabuse them of the idea that we
had set out in this vessel. Still, their
ridicule was a small price to pay for our deliverance.

Safely below deck with a full stomach and a glass of grappa,
Blachly confessed a story that shed new light on what had seemed to me the
extraordinary endurance he had demonstrated during our four days at sea. It concerned an event that, until then, he
had been too embarrassed to narrate to me.
But now our new ordeals apparently put this previous event into
perspective. Our conversations about
going to Mumbai had occurred, in fact, several months after we had first
learned of the Chadwicks’ interest in putting together a blockbuster nautical
retrospective. At the first discussion
of the show, Blachly’s response, unknown to me, had been rather different from
his later blithe acceptance. “I was
terrified,” he confessed. I paused to
clarify: “Wait, a two-month trip aboard a cargo vessel was fine, but the
prospect of co-curating a nautical exhibition sent you into a crisis?” “All I knew of ships was from Patrick
O’Brian, and actually I didn’t really understand a lot of the vocabulary in the
novels.” Lacking a solid nautical
education, Blachly had worried that his new task would expose his ignorance—or,
worse, cause him to make irremediable errors during restoration. And so Blachly, then nearly 50, had resolved
to confront this problem by going to sea, or at least going near to sea: the
next week he had volunteered for an internship on a schooner called the Pioneerwhich, owned by South Street Seaport,
made tourist voyages out into New York Harbor, and occasionally beyond. I had known all about his internship; it was
Blachly’s style to take on, with each project for the family, a version of the
Chadwicks’ life within his narrow means.
This helped him comprehend his work.
But here the discrepancy had seemed simply abject. Still, I had overcome this feeling and even
accompanied him out on the schooner one day, documenting the nautical knots and
rope coils in a manner that had made some of the more butch lads aboard
slightly uncomfortable. I had even
helped Blachly learn the arcane vocabulary required on board the ship, a
project that had given rise to a pamphlet called Practicing Nautical Sentences.

What I didn’t know, however, and what Blachly now began to
narrate, was an event that had occurred some weeks before my first and only
voyage. He stumbled often in the
narrative, described key elements in vague or imprecise ways, and generally
lacked the zing I would like this pamphlet to radiate. So I’ll avoid cumbersome quotation marks and
just present my own version of his story.
The conflict began with the hoisting of a sail, an activity requiring the
full participation of at least two deck hands.
On this day Blachly’s hoisting mate was a woman named Elizabeth, who
combined a salty knowledge of things nautical with an elegant and
well-exercised torso. Or so it struck
Blachly, who betrayed a fascination with the lone female mate upon their first
co-hoisting operations. On this fateful
day, however, when the ship was making a celebratory cruise part way down the
New Jersey coast, Blachly had taken advantage of her arms’ occupation with the
rope to drop his portion of the burden and lift her shirt enough to catch a
full view of the anchor tattoo on her stomach.
A roundhouse kick to the temple had halted Blachly’s inquiries. When he rose, sheepish and swollen, he had
been ordered to furl the spanker, a dangerous operation he had accomplished
only once before, with significant aid.
This time, however, Elizabeth turned her back, joining the rest of the
crew at the bow. And so it was, a few
minutes later—after he had climbed into position—that Blachly’s accidental
plunge into the sea went unnoticed. When
he came up to the surface an intense wave of embarrassment sealed his
mouth. Then, just as he had gathered
himself to scream, he was swamped by a real wave. By his third rise, the ship was out of
range. He was about two miles from
shore. A doable swim, if he could find some
jetsam on which to rest. Before long he
had located a plastic bait cooler—fetid, sticky—to which he clung
periodically. In about three hours he
had washed up on Sandy Hook. After this
unexplained departure, the crew aboard the Pioneer insisted on calling him Lord
Jim-bo.

The trawler made its way around the boot of Italy and docked in
Naples. There we flipped a euro to see
who would call the Chadwicks. Blachly
looked at the coin once it had landed, and then flipped it over once more into
his other hand, as if he had intended to do that from the beginning. I protested.

But since we hadn’t specified just a flip, or a flip and a slap to the
other hand, it was I who steadied myself for the barrage to come: the container
was gone, the boat was severely damaged, and we were late. “You’re in Naples you say, well that may be a
stroke of luck.” Had Dalton located his
lost laudanum supplies? Where was the
explosion? “Well, do your best with
restoration in the field—we’ll simply have to finish it in the studio. And while you’re waiting for a new shipping
container, gather all the materials you can on the Chadwicks and Winkelmann for
the 2017 tri-centennial exhibition, and on Admiral Nelson’s stay in
Naples. I’m sure the family name still
opens the gate at Palazzo Sessa.” I
didn’t question.

That the Chadwicks would have felt a deep connection to Admiral
Nelson is not surprising. Nelson was
noted for his ability to inspire the best in his men: the Nelson Touch, as it
was called, which became even more focused after he lost an arm at the Battle
of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797.
Indeed, the admiral’s grasp of strategy and unconventional tactics
produced a number of decisive victories, especially the Battle of the Nile
(1798), the Battle of Copenhagen (1801), and, of course, the Battle of
Trafalgar. When standard military
strategy dictated that commanders brought their line of frigates parallel the
enemy and then fired at close range, Nelson perfected a method of slicing
through the enemy line, isolating one section of the opposing fleet and
destroying it while the other hostile ships tacked to reposition themselves.

Nelson’s ties to the Chadwicks emerged through mutual connections,
in particular the Hamiltons—Lord William, British Envoy in Naples, and Emma,
Lady Hamilton, with whom Nelson carried on an open affair. It was also through the Hamiltons that the
Chadwicks first made the acquaintance of their current gallerist’s predecessor,
art critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose life was cut short by a hustler
and petty thief in Trieste in 1768. Thus
Nelson, who was born in 1758, was 10 years old when Winckelmann died: old
enough, that is, to have translated the Odyssey,
published three or four books of poems,and had several romantic liaisons at Eton, if one was a good English
literary prodigy. But Nelson was bound
for the sea, not the study. His rise
was to take place amid the rough shouts of deck hands, not the lisping of
antiquarians. And so he did not meet the
famous critic of Greek sculpture.

And yet Nelson got on surprisingly well with the learned. His close friend Lord Hamilton, or the
Cavaliere—as he was known—was, judging by volume of patronage, among the most
distinguished Neapolitan antiquarians. He collected more than 1000 Greek vases;
600 bronzes, 375 pieces of ancient glassware; 175 terracottas; 6000 coins,
along with cameos, intaglios, gems, statuary, erotic curiosa, and
paintings—some 350 canvases. The
publication of Hamilton’s collection of classical antiquities—Antiquités étrusques, grecques
et romaines (4 vols., 1767–76, text by Pierre François Hugues)—was a
massive work for which he paid more than 6000 pounds.

The impact of these volumes throughout
Europe was profound, and played a major role in the development of
neo-classical aesthetics, as did Lady Hamilton’s famous “attitudes,” in which
she posed for distinguished guests (Winkelmann, Goethe, Beckford, the
Chadwicks, Nelson) as various classical figures, draped in antique
costume. Hamilton tutored her in these
performances, and even designed a black-velvet-lined niche for her to stand in,
encasing her performances in a backdrop similar to those on his vases and
cameos. It may have been this willful
confusion between objects and persons that led Hamilton’s close friend Horace
Walpole to remark that the Cavaliere had “actually married his gallery of
statues;” and it was probably also what led Goethe to describe Emma as an
“object” (Gegenstand) to which
Hamilton’s “whole soul was devoted.”

Apparently, though, this soul-devotion left room for the living
sculpture to mingle freely with other bodies—like Nelson’s. The Chadwicks seemed to have hoped for similar
contact with this intermediate matter—encouraged not merely by the stories of
Emma, but by those—from William Beckford—about Hamilton’s first wife, Catherine.
Like Beckford, the Chadwicks cloaked
their advances under pleas for guidance from a sympathetic woman who fully
understood their maladies. All of which
may explain their protracted visit at Palazzo Sessa, which tested even
Hamilton’s patience.

Together with charges that a Chadwick lifted erotic curiosa from
the collection, and tried to broker an antiquities sale with a known tomb
looter—such were our discoveries in the Palazzo Sessa archive. The palazzo sits on Vico Santa Maria Cappella
and overlooks the Bay of Naples. We,
however, were in the basement, previous site of the Cavaliere’s collection
storage—a location only a few visitors in the eighteenth century were invited
to see, most being offered only a tour of the study. There was of course much more to learn—but
given the view of the family in the documents so far, we decided not to wait
another week for the two hours—Wednesday from 1 to 3pm—the archive was open to
the public. More discoveries like these
would no doubt end the Chadwicks’ inexplicably good humor.

And so, when the Finish container vessel on which we had booked
passage was ready to depart from the Port of Naples several days later, we did
not hesitate to board. There was no
coast of Somalia between Naples and New York.
Only beloved Palma, Gibraltar, and Cape Trafalgar itself, the little-known
site of the battle that gave its name to the square at the symbolic center of
imperial England. As we floated past
these locations, our attention turned once again to Nelson. The terrors of our ordeal in the Arabian Sea
now safely behind us, we began to bask in the admiral’s biography, trading
famous Nelson quips one for one on the forecastle.

Blachly: You know,
Foley, I have only one eye—I have a right to be blind sometimes.

Shaw: I have
fought contrary to orders, and I shall perhaps be hanged: never mind, let them.

Blachly: Take, sink,
burn, and destroy them.

Shaw: Our
weather-beaten ships will make their sides like plumb-pudding.

Blachly: Our plumb-pudding
will make their insides like weather-beaten ships.

Shaw: You know,
Blachly, I have only one good ankle—I have a right to be towed sometimes.

Blachly: There is no
way of dealing with a Frenchman but to knock him down.

Shaw: All
Frenchmen are alike—a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels

Blachly: I believe
that’s “At least country poets aren’t like French whores.”

Shaw: Although a
military tribunal may think me criminal, the world will approve my conduct.

Blachly: Let me alone,
I have yet my legs left, and one Emma.

Shaw: They have
done for me at last, Hardy … my backbone is shot through… my sufferings are
great, but will soon be over.

Blachly: Brave
Emma! Good Emma! If there were more Emmas, there would be more
Nelsons

Shaw: I never saw fear, what is it?

Blachly: Brave
Emma—it’s a Frenchman’s enema!

Shaw: I am ready
to quit this world of animus, and envy none, but those of the estate six feet
by two.

Blachly: Oh!
How I hate to be stared at!

Shaw: If it is a
sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive.

Our banter
had been very much like historic sea warfare itself: Blachly, not three feet
from me, firing a Nelson quip across my bow; and I, then, answering back,
letting loose the best word-volley I could remember. But, temporarily out of ammunition, we had
come to a stalemate. “Kiss me, Hardy,”
I offered as a truce. But Blachly was
not so easily pacified: “Kismet, Hardy,” he corrected, and explained how,
considering “Kiss me, Hardy” a little light in the docksiders, the most pressed
polo-shirted of naval historians had argued that in fact Nelson was suggesting
that his death was a matter of “kismet” or fate. Smooch me, undersecretary could simply not
have been the last words of the fiercest naval commander in the history of
western civilization! Or perhaps, I
countered, Nelson was actually disputing the fatefulness of the French
sharpshooter’s hit: “Kismet, hardly!”
His speech was rather slurred by that point in the battle. We seemed to be gearing up for more
broadsides of banter.

But at just that moment Blachly did
something genuinely surprising: he abandoned his defensive position alongside
me and, with a brief narrative, shot through my line of prepared quips! Blachly’s story, which again I prefer to
narrate myself, concerned the resolution of his time aboard the Pioneer. On the subsequent extended jaunt up the New
Jersey coast the weather had been rather rougher. Squalls had started in the harbor and, by the
time the schooner was under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, there was talk of
returning to port. But the captain had
pressed on. It was at this point that
Blachly asked to be lashed to the mast.
This was not a defense against the siren songs of the mysterious Perth
Amboy! Blachly was not now tempted by
that greasy vortex of American art history.
No, to the contrary: he wanted greater immersion in the present
storm. He pined to become an embodied
eye, engulfed entirely in the violent elements.
Not winding up floating on a cooler back to Sandy Hook this time would
also be a plus. The deck hands had, at
first, protested at this novel request from a mere intern. But it was Elizabeth who had overcome their
objections, cinching the ropes to the point of blisters as Blachly was hoisted
into position, grimacing (with anticipated pleasure?) until the others had gone
below deck. Now the drama began. Blachly was pitched violently over the
troughs of waves, up high into the air, and then down close to the sea’s
surface again as the boat swung erratically through the enormous swells. He nearly passed out with the first few
lunges, wetted himself excessively, then emitted wide arcs of vomit over the
seascape and deck. But once he had emptied
himself and become acquainted with the ship’s range of motions, his terror began
to abate. Gradually he was impressed by
a vision of the murky, swirling environments with which he would overlay his
copies of drawings from the Chadwick nautical archives.

But something else happened on that
mast as well. After ten minutes the
bobstays parted and the spanker, one of the few sails small enough to remain
usable in this weather, ripped from earring to clew. By this point Blachly’s harness was slightly
less snug. He discovered that he could
wiggle an arm entirely free. From there
it was only a matter of moments until he was, to his thrill and horror, merely
holding onto the mast that swung with such violent motions. But now these lurches were more
predictable. His steps up the mast were
quick and assured. He located the
spanker, furled and unfastened its two separate sections—and reattached a new
sail in their place. His actions were so
fast that the crew, concerned with the immediate dilemmas of navigation, had
not even glanced up until the task was accomplished. Even Elizabeth was less icy when he rejoined
the sailors below.

Several days later, as we were finally
coming in view of New York harbor, I felt somewhat empty on seeing the patch of
coastline Blachly had described in his story.
Yes, I had had more nautical experience.
Yes, this had better prepared for the Chadwicks’ current retrospective. And yes, most of all, I had had downright
unbelievable adventures on this journey to retrieve the Man o’Bar. But despite all this I wondered if I might
not have missed something in not accompanying Blachly on his expedition up the
New Jersey coast—and particularly in not having myself lashed to the mast of
the Pioneer in a storm.

What was it
about my own experiences that made them less attractive than the ones I knew
Blachly was exaggerating? What was it
about my immediate, tangible domain of scholarly seafaring that made it seem
less powerful—less total, less immersive—than his imperfectly and partially
recounted stories?

No, Blachly was clearly overstating his accomplishments. Had I been there, I’d have been able to frame
the events in a more accurate way.
They would have seemed, as they did now that I really thought about them,
but a prelude to our real drama of recovering the Nelson Man o’Bar. Perhaps the Chadwicks were rubbing off on
him—with their sense that whatever they had
done was the most important thing in the world, no matter how far fetched,
peripheral to the culture at large, and amplified in grandeur. If we often found ourselves agreeing, this was
only because with them—at least—we were offered the adventure of tacking in
pursuit of their claims in that vast ocean of evidence—the Chadwick archive—to
which we were now returning.

Half Seas Over

Kunsthal Amersfoort

Fall 2011

Half
Seas Over

New Genre
Scenes

From the
Chadwick Vault

Many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip

—Jacob Cats, Moral Emblems

With the Chadwicks’ inclusion in Märklinworld at Kunsthal Amersfoort two elements
of the family’s golden age collections will go on view for the first time in
the country that was their inspiration: Carousing
Chadwicks in a Tavern, a merry company sculpture,and Houtewael Breach, a
diorama depicting the 1651 collapse of the St. Antonis dike near Amsterdam. Like the Genretron
(a panoramic model of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting still housed
in Chadwick Manor) Houtewael Breach is
a large, manipulable sculpture based on the man-made landscape of Holland. One key difference between these works and
the tavern tableau, however, is that the latter was, in part, a personal memento
of a trip taken by Torrent Chadwick and Chadwick Dalton to Holland in the
1860s, capturing their descent into peasant garb and raucous inebriation at a
local tavern. Following the model of Goethe, who had always done his rowdiest
drinking while disguised as a rural laborer, so the Chadwicks, who would
certainly have been spotted were it not for their costumes, spent many happy hours
of anonymity in a world very much like that depicted in the canvases of Brouwer
and van Ostade.

Carousing Chadwicks in a Tavern is
however more than merely the reminiscence of a single event: it is also a set
used by the Chadwicks in their eccentric brand of tableau vivant. Whereas most nineteenth-century tableaux
vivants were based on the shifting facial and bodily expressions of a central
dramatic figure, often an attractive woman—like Lady Hamilton in her Greek
attitudes—the Chadwicks pursued the ongoing not the discrete, the everyday not
the mythic. The poses they struck in
these taverns thus did not reveal interiors or typify psychological states so
much as trace temporary atmospheres. To
this end their costumes involved enormous slabs of crusted paint, as it might
have appeared in the strokes of their favorite genre painters. Varying compositions were revealed to viewers
by the sudden exposure of light—a gunpowder photographic flash in an otherwise
darkened chamber—freezing the revelers in an arranged pose, before collapsing
the room into total darkness once again.
This was a world of sheens and glosses uncoupled from character.

Houtewael
Breach, by contrast, was one of the few family
dioramas shown to visiting dignitaries—this because (in Chadwick Dalton’s
account of the scene) it depicted a technological failure by the rival Dutch
nation. Others in the family certainly
felt empathy for the Dutch and valued the scene not as an occasion to gloat
about supposed English superiority but as a reminder of nature’s ability to
visit sudden chaos even on the best made societies; some Chadwicks even
suggested that the diorama was a secret nod to Cornelius van der Chadwijk, the
Dutch engineer who emigrated in some haste to the American colonies in the
seventeenth century after a series of his dams failed.

In any case, then, it was not until the hard
economic times of 1930s that the two sections were joined, with the consequent
suggestion that the drunken carelessness of the family fathers of yore had in
fact caused the massive dike break of
the Chadwicks’ fortunes. Now, as the two
scenes met in a head-on collision (perhaps for practical purposes of space
preservation in the crowded manor?) the free depiction of oblivion in the best
manner of the Adriaens—Brouwer and Van Ostade—attached itself to a crass and
moralizing purpose. Looking at it
myself, in its mutilated new state, I could feel the horror of the earliest
Chadwick collectors of Dutch art, who sought in the masterly paintings of the
period not some easily reducible aphorism or example, not some pat iconographic
“meaning,” but rather the great and now secular depiction of extended time, of
an ongoingness found in the flat spaces of the landscape the Dutch had made,
and the dimly lit haylofts into which they retired to drink in the evenings
after strolling in that expanse.

The invitation from Kunsthal Amersfoort to
exhibit the piece again, then, filled Blachly and me with the hope that we
could now finally restore the piece to its initial and obviously preferable
state. Blachly had even begun inquiries
with the rest of the team at Amann Conservation, who had recommended a series
of period substances to plug up the holes that had been bored between the dike
break and tavern scenes. We were
therefore not prepared for our first conversation with museum officials: “No,
no—we want the piece exactly as it is—we’re planning to run a model train
through the middle of it, right through the barrel—a nice transition, don’t you
think?” said Robbert Roos, chief curator of KADE. It was some moments before I could form
words. The first that sprung to mind
were the incantatory Dutch curses documented in Washington Irving’s History of New York: dieven—schobbejaken—deugenieten—twist-zoekeren—oozen-schalken—blaes-kaeken.

But if I met this indignity head on, those whose
cause I was supporting would actually suffer more: just then at another of
their many financial tipping points, the Chadwicks had expressed more than
their usual concern that we wrap up the negotiation with the museum soon and
without complications. And so I swallowed
hard: “What gauge is the train?”

I didn’t hear a word Robbert was saying. My mind had now filled with the droning
sounds of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World,” with its moderne graphic design
surfaces on top of which the choreographed exotic dancers whirled against the
gentle plash of the boat. I remembered the
Dutch section, with three children popping out of tulips against a backdrop of
windmills. I remembered the monorails I
had taken at “futuristic” world fairs and theme parks in the 1970s, how they
could be used, like boats, to visit the past: of revolutionary war generals,
lusty pirates, and even medieval knights.
Happily though, real pirates or knights did not have to witness their
historical representations in theme parks.
It was bad enough, later that night, to watch a YouTube video of Johnny
Depp, trying his best to seem upbeat on a new Pirates of the Caribbean ride at
Disneyland (“that’s excellent”), then gazing at his full-size mobile figurine,
lurching up from a barrel to stare him in the face (“it’s a little more than
spooky”). The Chadwicks would not have
been so polite upon seeing their visages wrenched from the privacy of the manor
and turned into a whistle stop on a filmed model train itinerary, so that a
stranger’s passage through their stay in Holland might take its place along any
number of other virtual trips on real or digital trains.

I was cursing Disney again the next afternoon
as Blachly and I waded through Times Square, on an errand from our studio on 39th
street. Not that I looked for the
entrance to Footlocker, Swatch, Planet Hollywood or Forever 21, but it occurred
to me that the unanticipated effect of transforming the square’s facades
entirely into advertising screens was that it became difficult to know where to
enter many of these virtual stores. An
elf stranded on a desert island celebrated the joys of Pepsi. One building over was another such elf. Then Santa.
All were alone, except for their pacifying soft drinks. Captured in still photographs, the North Pole
toymakers were thus trapped not merely in the alien tropics, but in a remote
technological regime, scoffed at by all the square’s LED surfaces. I didn’t have the heart to mention the train
to Chadwick Dalton III on our next visit to the manor. I had merely asked if, perhaps, this time we
could simply exhibit the original model from the manor rather than being forced
to construct yet another reproduction of a Chadwick original. But Dalton’s remark had put the matter to
rest with his typically acerbic economy: “What part of priceless don’t you understand, Mr. Shaw?” And so Blachly and I were on our way to an
old time hobby shop on 45th street.

The non-synchronous whirring of two fans
provided a diffuse electornica soundtrack as we descended the stairs into the
Red Caboose. The basement room was
wedged, floor to ceiling, with old cardboard model boxes that seemed to have
been printed decades ago, and often far away: in Germany or Holland, in
Switzerland or Austria or Japan. Small
packages of painted figures were glued directly to the wall: a cardinal
performing a benediction, farmers digging, 1940s families with their
luggage—fleeing a site of devastation in the war? Evergreens hung in tight plastic bags next to
fruit trees with red apples, and an array of ground covers. We could discern little logic in the overall
organization. And the monosyllabic
remarks from the man behind the front counter—Alan, we later learned—offered no
help. Nothing seemed to have changed
down here since 1972. It was a closed
world of model enthusiasts—not seeking to expand, popularize or reach out to potential
converts who might wander down from the street.
After some time we discovered that a concentration of ships had washed
up in the back left corner. Frances—a
wiry Chinese man in his late 50s—priced boxes in the last row. One gauge, or 1/32nd scale, is a
somewhat exotic proposition among model makers: too large to store in quantity,
it must be seen mostly through the rare example, from which one extrapolates,
calls a warehouse in Ohio or Bavaria, and hopes that the box will contain
something similar to what one saw in the showroom. Much more common to find HO, the scale I remembered
from my own childhood. Blachly explained
to Frances that he didn’t need a polished perfect ship, but merely a
wreck. Frances pointed us to several
options, and discoursed on their pros and cons.
Then, doubling back a moment later, he offered that by burning plastic
and blowing a fan one could make the work appear singed.

“When you’re pasting on the boxes, Frances,
you can go all the way to the corner, don’t worry about covering a little bit
of the writing. Frances, I’ve told you
this before, it’s important to get all of them in a row.” “Okay, okay, I’ll do it that way Alan,” was
Frances’s mild response. This system of
hot glue gunning in the models was perhaps unique to the Red Caboose. And though Frances seemed to have worked in
this quiet pocket of model-making utopia for time immemorial, still he had not mastered
the system to Alan’s satisfaction.
Frances picked up a plastic container and handed it to Alan. “I saw this back here, not sure what it
belongs with.” “That’s not good,
Frances, that’s not good. Where did you
find that? Well, the package is
broken. And Frances, you know this means
someone stole what was inside and left this on the floor.” Alan wore dual magnifying glasses in a green
visor, now pushed up onto the large bald spot in the middle of his head, now snatched
down over his eyes as a checklist of model prices or a magazine article
required his attention. We approached
about a price. “Frances, I’ve told you
this before about the glue gun—you have to fit them all on the rack without
leaving so much space—you can put some glue on the corner of the box, it’ll
come off, or if it doesn’t it doesn’t matter, Frances, but I don’t know what
you’re thinking when you’re putting up those boxes.” “Well, okay, I’ll try with a little less
spacing.”

“It’s $39,” Alan told us about a small ripped
plastic bag containing some unpainted Preiser figure fragments. We passed, but soon
found other prizes. As these made their
way into our pile, Alan became more voluble.
He checked price guides. He
discoursed on the parts-makers. And
then, “Since I can tell you’re both model makers,” he fell to the topic of
rapid prototyping: the use of three-dimensional images as the basis for models
fabricated by digital machines. He
showed us a favorite example that involved patches of grass and a small cracked
wooden doorway on a rural shack. It was
rather remarkable. At this point we
asked him if he’d seen Otherworldly, the
current show on models at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. His face lit up: “No, not yet, but I’m going
to,” he said, reaching for a Times review of the exhibition that he had on the
counter next to him, tucked in a clear plastic sleeve. “Actually, you know, we’re in that show,”
Blachly offered. Alan’s eyes opened
wide: chilliness, grudging acknowledgement and now outright enthusiasm. “I have
to call Bob. I can’t believe it. Here write your names on this paper. Bob’s gonna be amazed, he told me about the
show.” We had become rapid prototypes of
model-making royalty. With the mention
of Märklinworld,
Alan was now discoursing gleefully on the minutiae of the company’s history,
and our possible roles in the exhibition.
Neither of us breathed a word about the Chadwicks. They had had enough attention. Enough praise. It was a rare occurrence indeed for us to be
commended for our work in the airless, cramped studio, sweating over the
replicas of the family’s dioramas—while they hunted foxes, drank unobtainable
brandies, and commissioned new curios for which they had no means (or
intention) of paying.

Back at the
studio I cut out and glued together Van Goyenesque burlap lined cardboard
huts—the tops of which would be visible above the inundation. Blachly lathed sculptamold onto blue foam
landscape contours. We would be back in
Holland for the first time since our fateful research trip of 2007, during
which we’d uncovered new materials about Cornelius van der Chadwick, and also,
in our spare time, developed a project about recent nautical architecture—Contemporary Sterns. The Dutch trip had been a turning point, in a
sense: immersed daily in landscape and genre scenes, it had impressed upon us
the need for the reconstruction of the Chadwicks’ Genretron with its halcyon Hobbema groves, its quiet Van Goyen
riverscape, and its brooding Van der Neer town on the ice nocturne. The Chadwicks would of course have insisted,
then as now, on the absolute difference between sculptures based on landscape
painting, and model train sets, where industry and nature are reduced to their
most readily legible caricatures. But
was the connection so ridiculous? I
remember Chadwick Dalton’s expression of rage and revulsion when a young
relative—a boy of 9 years old—was unlucky enough, visiting the family manor
with his parents, to compare the Genretron
to his Märklin train set. As
important as we felt these differences to be, still, afterward Blachly and I
were unable to resist referring to Dalton III privately as the Genretron’s “engineer”—the striped-cap-wearing
authority who presides over his peaceful miniature domain.

Where, then, did
that leave Houtewael Breach? In what sense did a dike break, a scene
of muddy chaos, represent control? Could
one claim that, as a detailed, three-dimensional view of a historic
catastrophe, the dike break was—no matter the Chadwicks’ conscious attitude
toward the Dutch—a memorial and even a redemptive fantasy? A memorial simply in fleshing out or embodying
this event—in making it real; a redemptive fantasy in casting our attention
toward its underlying physical causes: knowing these, a viewer might
imaginatively correct them, might fill the breach, and transform the scene of undifferentiated
sludge into a pleasant landscape in which sea has once again been separate from
land.

According to the Chadwicks, the answer was
simply … no. Approached increasingly by
institutions that wanted to show Houtewael
Breach in exhibitions on recent natural disasters, the Chadwicks
refused. They hated topicality. The first such invitation had followed
directly on the heels of Katrina, but the Chadwicks had felt that the
atmosphere of generalized pathos would detract from a careful examination of
the model itself: viewers would be too quick to lump and analogize. Despite the financial pressures at the manor,
it had been difficult to get the family to agree to show the work in
Amersfoort. Then, just as we were
finishing the preparation, Hurricane Irene struck, rendering the poor diorama
topical once again. The Chadwicks were
irate! But Blachly and I suggested that
with global warming these storms were likely to increase rather than decrease, and
so showing Houtewael Breach now was a
better proposition than waiting until art discourse was simply dominated by
discussion of floods, and a range of inferior dioramas had already begun to
satisfying the public’s demand for three-dimensional representations of
water-borne catastrophes.

As we whittled and carved, we couldn’t resist
comparing the diorama to the television coverage of the hurricane. On t. v., the knowledge was frustratingly
partial: almost invariably the on-the-spot reporter was positioned at what was
supposed to be a crucial scene in the hurricane’s path, but which looked
indistinguishable from the others.
Diagonal rain pelted his slicker.
His slight grimace and hunched posture registered some generically
“hostile environment.” Behind him was a
fallen tree, broken power lines, or a swollen river. None of it actually looked like anything. There
was no satisfying detail, let alone a broad, reliable picture. The overview’s poor substitute was the
generic digital image of the swirling storm as a blue and red vortex moving
across a throbbing green map, familiar from nightly news broadcasts: here we
just saw the outlines of North Carolina or New York; Connecticut or New Jersey. What did we really know, for instance, about
the rage of the Passaic River, the new landscape it was creating?

Blachly in particular became concerned about
the representation of his threatened childhood home. If New Jersey was going to bend to Irene—if
the Passaic River of William Carlos Williams and Robert Smithson was going to
divide Paterson in two—then surely the rain-pelted field reporter stationed by
a generic downed tree was not the appropriate “witness.” Where were the new Jan van Goyens of New
Jersey’s undifferentiated mud expanse?
Where was the entropic sight mode that could match Irene’s frightening
vigor? “The seventeenth-century Dutch
wouldn’t have let their disaster coverage devolve to that,” Blachly burst out
at one point. But I cautioned silenced on
this issue, knowing that such expressions would be taken as unseemly.

Friday, April 1, 2011

This historic exhibitionat the Hunt Museum in Limerick, as part of the 2010 EV+A, is the first showing of the Chadwicks’ Shipwreck Memorials in nearly 150 years.These memorials, paper reliefs mounted on wooden supports, depict the moment immediately after a ship has been claimed by the raging sea—that frightening instant when the ocean begins the process of digesting the man-made barque—leaving only a few isolated spars, a little jetsam, and the slightest hint of a massive descending volume just below the surface.Engraved brass plaques identify the recently vanished vessel and suggest something of the mental attitude the Chadwicks might like the viewer to adopt in memorializing each particular tragedy. This exhibition focuses on vessels lost on or near the Irish coast during the Big Wind of January 6, 1839—the freakish hurricane that devastated ships in the Shannon Estuary and wreaked havoc throughout the island.

Coupledwith the Shipwreck Memorials are two informational vitrines organized around the events of the Big Wind—including period study models and a contemporary homage to the event by the editors of the Chadwick Family Papers, art restorer J. Blachly and literary historian Lytle Shaw.

Inthe early nineteenth century the Chadwicks (a prominent trans-Atlantic family of art connoisseurs, amateur historians, and men of letters) began collecting firsthand accounts of harrowing shipwrecks.They presented this activity as an anthropological effort to preserve a threatened oral culture and to honor those often overlooked deckhands who were routinely lost at sea.

In this sense the family’s project seems to have been inspired by the anthropological turn in European culture that had begun in the late eighteenth-century works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Macpherson, and the later English Romantic poets.

Allof these writers sought to complicate the centralizing tendency in European literature by appealing instead to a wide range of regional, linguistically various folk cultures, both historic and contemporary.Such oral literature was thought to roughen and energize the deadened, overly familiar idioms of poetry in the literary capitals, to introduce new forms and new speakers, and to liberate writers from unconsciously aping the concerns of Paris and London.

Thereis some debate, however, about whether or not the Chadwicks’ memorials fit squarely within this new tendency in European culture.Some of the Chadwicks’ critics, in fact, have characterized the interviews that predate the memorials less as attempts to honor fallen sailors than as so many ploys to gain technical information about shipwrecks that might be used in legal cases. It is well documented that the Chadwick family had massive stakes in most of the British and European shipping lines, and so that the matter of fault in shipwrecks was of more than an antiquarian or abstract moral concern; convincingly demonstrated, it could yield very concrete monetary rewards.

Indeedsome critics claimed that Torrent Chadwick, an absentee Irish landlord, shipping magnate and something of a wastrel, used information about his Irish tenants (made available through the Poor Laws instituted in Ireland by his cousin Edwin Chadwick) as the basis for a series of predatory lawsuits by which he reversed initial insurance rulings both on rent-strikes and on Irish shipwrecks.Nor can the Chadwicks’ project be squared with the typically nationalist frame that drove the documentation of folk culture—since the Chadwicks were an English, not an Irish family.

TheChadwicks’ critics have a point when they remind viewers that it was not until after the charge that Torrent was both abusing classified information and manipulating his interviewees that he and other family members began the series of shipwreck memorial reliefs we see before us today—as if to appease skeptical viewers.As editors of the Chadwick archive, however, Blachly and I felt it better not take an explicit position in this debate.We consider it our job merely to document the available facts and allow informed and critical viewers to decide for themselves on the matter.And it is in this spirit that we offer this pamphlet to viewers of the EV+A exhibition.

Thepamphlet itself is the result of extensive research conducted over the last six months in a variety of archives: firstly that of Chadwick Manor, where we examined all materials we could relating to the historic shipwreck memorials, including interview transcriptions, song manuscripts, nautical yarns, and insurance claims and legal correspondence—in addition to the paper reliefs themselves, which we restored, polished and attributed, where authorship and dating were at issue.As compelling as the family’s own archives are, Blachly and I gradually came to realize that certain key details would not come into focus unless we cross referenced them with contemporary accounts from outside the Chadwicks’ orbit.And it was for this reason that we traveled to the Limerick City Archives in Merchant’s Quay, where we camped out for a fortnight, piecing our way through Irish accounts of the Big Wind, responses to the Chadwicks’ folk-collections, and press clipping about the family’s lawsuits.

Blachlywas moved, in particular, by the unexpected, almost surreal displacements produced by the hurricane: tea cups preserved without fractures in thatching dozens of miles away; playing cards blown three counties and stuck perfectly into barn doors; even slate roofing tiles catapulted several hundred yards into irregular paths leading nowhere.Over our post-research pints, Blachly obsessed about these vanished wind sculptures as he called them, proposing eventually that we re-trace their positions—so as better to conceptualize the power of the Big Wind. Thus we found ourselves on a variety of localÉireannbusses, and short irregular rail services, trying to match the mostly Gaelic names in our records with the since transliterated versions that appear on modern maps. Several times Blachly and I were unceremoniously hustled off soggy fens and bogs that irate custodians reminded us were closed to public exploration—one rural gentleman seeing us to the margin of his driveway at the end of his pitchfork.

Despitethe occasional frustration, though, these extended expeditions in the Irish countryside only convinced us all the more firmly of the Big Wind’s singular sweep and magnitude.And it was on our bus rides back from these remote historic locations that Blachly, moved in his own way by the antique hurricane, began conceptualizing his own monuments to the memory of the Big Wind. Accordingly his attention gravitated to stray pieces of fabric and broken umbrellas—contemporary evidence of wind’s unceasing powers of displacement, as he termed it.

Myown attentions, however, had been directed in a more focused manner at the scholarly matters at hand.I had cross-referenced most of the Chadwicks’ published songs, garnered evidence about the family’s public reception at the time of the lawsuits, and fleshed out my historical understanding of the Big Wind more generally when, at the end of the first week in the archives my hands passed over a crude period notebook among a poorly sorted pile of Big Wind artifacts.Inside the front cover was the name of one of Ireland’s most remarkable writers: James Clarence Mangan, the nineteenth-century poet and translator who, enlisted for the nationalist cause, tended instead to reflect on problems of translation and authenticity.

Werethese really his longhand notations?The matter was quickly resolved with a digital search of established examples of his handwriting: the book was unmistakable.With a little detective work it became clear that Mangan had visited the west of Ireland the week following the devastation, composing memorials.The first poem in the notebook, “Gone in the Wind,” for instance, has long been included in Mangan’s collected works—understood as an allegorical poem, whose key stanza reads:

Solomon! where is thy throne?It is gone in the wind.

Babylon! where is thy might?It is gone in the wind.

All that the genius of Man hath achieved or designed

Waits but its hour to be dealt with as dust by the wind.

Butthe general march of time begins to look rather different when it is re-coupled with actual places and specific winds, as it is in an early version in the Limerick Big Wind notebook:

Shannon! where is thy fleet?It is gone in the wind.

Ballybunnion! where is thy light? It is gone in the wind.

Mangan’sinterest in the Big Wind, however, seems to have extended beyond the particular destruction visited upon the Shannon Estuary.His notebook also indicates that he made tours both of the worst hit sections throughout the island, and of particularly remarkable displacements caused by the winds.Among this latter category were North Atlantic albacore tunas and halibuts blown some 90 miles inland.And it is his fascination with these freak specimen’s of nature’s power that gives us a strikingly new picture of Mangan’s most famous song, “Dark Rosaleen,” known as a translation from the Gaelic, which includes in the 1846 version the line:

I dashed through Erne; —the world may learn the cause from love

Reasonably enough, this poem has always been understood as a love lyric that reflects on proto nationalist themes.But in Mangan’s Big Wind notebook we found an earlier version of the poem next to a carefully depicted sketch of a tuna embedded as it was in roof thatching.The original line reads:

Fins dashed through air;—the world may learn to troll above

Apparently it was only after the Dublin university journal saw the poem as too narrowly occasional (and frankly unbelievable to those who had not undergone the hurricane directly) that Mangan re-presented the poem as a translation from the Gaelic original.

Why, then, were the most prestigious Irish literary magazines averse to specific memorials about the Big Wind?What was it about the event that caused it to disappear from discussion at the time?Encountering this phenomenon softened my aversion to Blachly’s makeshift photographic project and I, too, gradually came around to the need for contemporary memorials to Ireland’s terrifying nocturnal gale.

ButI must admit that this was not the only factor that softened my attitude.Daily contact with the Irish view of the Chadwicks had given me rather a different sense of the family’s role in British history from that preserved and, well, celebrated at Chadwick Manor.Torrent Chadwick’s role in Ireland especially had raised eyebrows: always pressed to settle gambling debts from Watier’s, Torrent had become an advocate of enforced immigration for what he deemed “overcrowded” farms.This position was developed not through an analysis of the actualities of Irish farming conditions (let alone the role of absentee landlords in the making of these conditions). Torrent was motivated rather through his involvement in several of the prominent shipping lines that ran from Limerick, Cork, and especially Liverpool to Montreal, Boston and New York.Prompted by government subsidies for immigration, the ships would haul lumber to Ireland and England, and tenant farmers back.

Contemporaryreports complained of the poor quality and inadequate volume of provisions, the squalid and “immoral” conditions in the hold, and the martial tenor of the crew.

Terrified of losses, Chadwick seems to have hounded his crews about chart reading, dead reckoning and procedures for saving cargo under adverse conditions.And when a ship in his fleet was lost at sea, Chadwick rarely accepted the published reports, captain’s accounts, or testimony from witnesses aboard vessels within sight of the disaster.No storm, according to Chadwick, was sufficient cause for a wreck, and so, when they were unlucky enough to survive the sinking of a company vessel, Chadwick ruthlessly sued his captains, often on the basis of reports gathered from deckhands who may well have been encouraged (and even bribed) to mischaracterize the actions of superiors they had come to resent aboard a rigidly hierarchical ship—Chadwick lines being famous for their unwavering discipline.Indeed Chadwick seems to have doubted reports about the Big Wind itself, accusing Irish reporters of hyperbole and captains of incompetence.What was most striking about Chadwick’s involvement in these cases, though, was the magnate’s refusal to hire a lawyer, and his consequent monopolizing of the stand during the court proceedings.Apparently irritated by his rambling arguments and condescending asides, some of the Irish judges in fact began to refer to Chadwick himself as “the Big English Wind.” In any case, he was able to win few of the lawsuits.

Itmay well have been to cover the tracks of his interrogations both in Limerick specifically and in the larger Shannon Estuary that Torrent devoted as much time and attention as he did to the Big Wind memorials.We do know that at least a dozen of the 41 ships lost in Ireland during the Big Wind were run by companies in which the Chadwicks owned large or even controlling stakes.We also know, however, that when Torrent was not taking the stand to pursue his cases, he was passionately involved in the pursuit of nautical lore.And if it appears from the Limerick archives that this pursuit could certainly have aided his suits, there is no getting around the fact that Torrent’s fascination with ship models, historic seafaring uniforms, and even pirate and deckhand lingo were real and life-long.Torrent was an avid model builder and, partaking in the nascent spirit of historic revival that gripped Europe in his day, an early enthusiast of reconstructions of historic vessels and famous voyages—a fact that would certainly have endeared him to John Hunt.

Torrentmaintained an oak-paneled nautical suite at Chadwick Manor until the time of his death, in which the Shipwreck Memorials were the prized display pieces.Perhaps concerned that others at the family manor would not share his enthusiasm, late in life Torrent grew especially eager that, after he passed on, these works dear to his heart be placed in a secure and permanent venue. This attitude about his occasional handiwork, and about his larger emotional response to the tragedy of the Big Wind, does complicate claims about Torrent’s supposedly unfeeling use of the hurricane.Indeed the memorials themselves demonstrate a knowledge not only of the minute geography of the Shannon Estuary and of the specific manner in which each vessel was lost; they indicate, beyond that, specific attitudes of remorse appropriate to each vessel, be it the great deference shown to a vessel named after the sovereign—

TheChadwicks Bow for the Wellington

Bashed on the Rocksat Bunratty, 1839

the formal homage or memorial directed toward the aristocratic ships—

Homageto the Earl of Caithness

Lostat anchor during the Big Wind, January 1839

Homageto the Henry Hastings

Founderedin the Shannon Estuary in the Big Wind

Memorialfor the Diligence

Capsizedat Ailroe Beg, 1839

orthe more singular acts of recollection and memorialization proposed by the other paper reliefs, in which, depending upon the circumstances, the Chadwicks “pause” (for a graceful, lady-like vessel blown into a violent collision with a sticky tug, the Tar, engaged in harbor maintenance), “gasp” (for a fine military frigate devastated on the bluffs), or “flinch” (as if stuck by the great impact of Dart, cast precipitously like its namesake by the hurricane):

TheChadwicks Pause for the Swan

RunAfoul of the Tar by the Big Wind

TheChadwicks Gasp for the Albion

18-GunSloop of War Driven into the Bluffs at Kilrush in the Big Wind

The Chadwicks Flinch for the Dart

HurledUpon the Mounds at Baysend by the Big Wind

Instill other circumstances the Chadwick seem to evoke some impossible recompense for those vessels lost in terrifying conditions, the most poetic perhaps being the last of the collection displayed in Limerick:

ACalm for the Hamilton

Wrecked Upon the Shoals at Moyne,1839

It was a brilliant stroke of luck that this exhibition came to take place at the Hunt Museum—since the Captain’s Room, in its earlier incarnation as the parlor of the Limerick City Customs House, was a familiar haunt of Torrent’s when he was in the region.But perhaps even more fittingly, the museum in its new incarnation is also close to the Chadwick family, since John Hunt, a name we heard often at the Manor, was a figure well known to the more recent Chadwicks through their Riverdale New York neighbor, Bashford Dean, who worked extensively with Hunt in developing the Metropolitan Museum armor collections, and the larger medieval purchases of the Cloisters, for which Hunt was a special and highly valued advisor.Indeed Dean fondly recounted to the Chadwicks the details of several archaeological digs on which he was able to tag along—unearthing Neolithic axe heads and crucial evidence about a prehistoric settlement Hunt later reconstructed as a kind of theme park.The curiosity was, of course, more than mutual, since Hunt was eager to learn about the famous collectors whose estate was so close to Dean’s countryseat on the Hudson.There may in fact be some basis for speculating that the transhistorical scope of Hunt’s own collection was based in part on the fine model of such an encyclopedic treasure trove popularized by the Chadwicks in the nineteenth century, and later made affordable by the World Wars in Europe in the twentieth.But whether or not the Chadwicks were an explicit model for John and Gertrude’s voyage through world art history, the monument they assembled, now housed so effectively in the former Limerick City Customs House, is precisely the kind of setting the Chadwicks would have insisted upon for the display of their Shipwreck Memorials.Finally, whatever one makes of the specific social concerns that swirl around the moment of their fabrication, the Chadwicks’ Shipwreck Memorials may now be appreciated, with proper distance, as a moving esthetic response both to the terrors of pre-modern navigation and to the tragedy of the most disruptive meteorological event in Ireland’s recorded history.